Love Goes to Glory
by Leeson
Summary: She likes the lack of hearts and pens, but in the end it’s far worse than all that. Lit AUFuture. One shot.


**Love Goes to Glory (1/1)  
She likes the lack of hearts and pens, but in the end it's far worse than all that.  
****I do not own the characters or universe depicted.**

"I gave it all up for you! I gave up Harvard! Do you even understand how big that is? Harvard!" She looks down, phone still clutched to her ear. "I gave up Harvard for you. Because I wasn't too busy to think about it. Because you made me think about it! And you left! And now, you call. And you sit silently and I yell at you." She takes a breath, dropping onto her bed. "I lied. I didn't maybe love you. I loved you. I mean, it was nothing like fiction would lead you to believe, but I liked that. I liked that there were no hearts and pens."

"Nice reference."

They haven't even seen one another in three years, but every few weeks she receives a silent caller at whom she yells or talks or just sits as quietly until the dial tone blares like a fire engine.

But he's never spoken before.

She's started to think its just run-of-the-mill wrong numbers that are so shocked by her yelling and openness that they freeze.

Apparently not.

"_Say Anything_, right? Lloyd, Diane. The boom box over the head?"

"Y-yeah." She nods, despite the fact she's only talking to him on the phone.

He's quiet for a moment. "Can you hold on a minute?"

She nods again before she answers. "Okay."

Before long, the muffled sounds of an Asian language travel through the line and she wonders what it is. Her knowledge of such languages extends only to what she's heard in the Kim household and the two Vietnamese phrases Owen Meany taught her just before her eleventh birthday.

Then he's back, speaking imperfect English she can't quite decipher except for a single word at the start. "Sorry."

With the one decipherable word, the world collapses in around her and the walls take the fall. They start to constrict; cracking and crumbling as they make there way towards her.

She pulls the phone away from her ear and hits the end button.

It still sounds foreign to her.

She doesn't answer unknown numbers anymore, and she hasn't for almost a year. It doesn't seem to matter to him because her school e-mail begins to serve the same purpose; him saying nothing and her saying everything.

But one day he talks about work. The indecipherable language was Laotian, and she can only think of a handful of episodes of _King of the Hill_ that she caught when she had FX on to drown out Paris and Doyle's fighting. It's the only channel that is more distracting than the screaming.

The only Jess Mariano that the white pages can locate is in Naugatuck, and she's pretty sure he doesn't live in Connecticut.

She drives the half-hour anyway and finds out that while Jess Mariano from Naugatuck exists, he isn't the right Jess Mariano.

That's how she finds herself sneaking around Luke's apartment, looking for an address book or scrap of paper with a current phone number.

She has no luck, and the next morning he finds an e-mail in his inbox.

_To: Jess Mariano  
From: Rory Gilmore  
Subject: (none)  
_

_Call me. Please._

He ignores the message, doesn't call her, and stops sending e-mails.

Her bedroom seems like a wide open space for the first time since she turned seventeen and a crazy-haired boy asked her what much was.

There's a weird sort of tension, sitting across from each other and trying to eat a Thanksgiving meal. She blames the both of them, neither ever talking to Lorelai or Luke about how awkward they were.

She figures Lorelai should've known anyway.

Jess is as compacted as he can be across from her; folded into himself and lacking any sort of life.

She looks up halfway through the meal, and stares straight at him. "Where did you learn Laotian?"

Half the table goes quiet, the other half oblivious. They don't share each other, no one knows they've talked since five and a half years ago, a bus and a bag and a promise that was kept over and over.

He doesn't answer immediately, just continues to eat his perfect turkey and allow the crowd to continue on their discussions. Finally, he stands and climbs the stairs to go to bed and after a discreet enough amount of time, when there are people leaving, she's knocking on his room door. He answers in pajama bottoms and a tee shirt and a tired sigh before moving aside and letting her in. "My step-mother," he answers her earlier question without missing a beat. He closes the door and flips on a light. The room is cast in a soft glow and the way he's lit makes him seem like a messenger from Hell.

"Oh." She takes a minute to realize what he's talking about.

"What're you doing up here, Rory?"

She doesn't answer and just sits on the bed. She's as uncertain of the answer as he is.

Before they can reach comfort, she leaves without a word and he doesn't try to stop her.

Later, when Lorelai asks why she wasn't in her room, she'll lie that she needed a cigarette, and made a promise to call Marty.

And the next day she'll buy a carton of the cigarettes he used to smoke.

"Isn't this just a huge cliché?" is all she can ask, her skirt pushed up around her waist and the doorknob to the closet lacking life.

He doesn't answer but doesn't do the anciently familiar maneuver of shutting her up with a kiss, either. They did the same thing at the engagement party and the rehearsal dinner. Sneaking off to a room or closet and copulating. She makes a joke whenever Marty asks her where she's disappeared to. She thinks she'll joke about fucking her ex this time, because joking truthfully is still telling the truth.

She also knows that when Lorelai hears about it, she'll know it wasn't a joke. She'll know that her pride and joy snuck off to a closet to have sex with the hoodlum boy that shattered her like glass.

She decides she'll do it anyway, say it in front of everyone and find out who calls her on it first while Marty trusts her with every fiber.

He trusts her because he loves her. She sneaks off to closets with this long forgotten boy and his bullshit eyes that tell her he loves her because Marty won't hurt her like he will. She's not masochistic, but she can't help but want him to hurt her again. Because if he does it again, maybe she can hate him.

So she does, and Lorelai calls her on it in front of every guest, every server and God. "I can't believe you did that, Rory!"

And Marty looks confused and everyone else starts talking to her. A hand finds hers, everyone too preoccupied with raging him that they can't see him, and pulls her from the mass.

She only stares at him as they drive down the highway, some new wave crap turning to static as the sign says they're leaving Connecticut.

There's a closet in their apartment. Three, actually. One in each of the two bedrooms and one in the bathroom. But they have a bed, so the only things in the closets are clothes and luggage.

Marty doesn't call anymore, and neither does her mother, but she's sure that Luke fills Lorelai in after his weekly call with Jess.

In between, they work and live in sin. They read manuscripts and it makes her degree in English actually mean something. Everyone from Truncheon talks about starting a periodical, and she's trying to talk him into it. No luck so far.

Every eighth Saturday, she visits her grandparents and he visits his mother. They meet in New York on Sunday morning and spend the day in the city before they head back to Philly. She doesn't call it The Big Apple anymore unless she's mocking tourists. She ignores her hypocrisy and he doesn't bring it up.

She wonders when he'll do it; hurt her. He says it won't happen.

She's sad to realize it might be true.

Both names are on the lease, they have joint bank accounts and their co-workers ask when they're getting hitched.

He says never.

She changes the subject.

They don't work well enough to involve rings and God.

Lorelai always assumes the worst when she calls, every few months. It's never anything bad. But it's never anything at all. Her life is a smear of dull colors and dirty bed sheets. She has nothing she doesn't want, she has everything she ever could, and the only thing wrong with the picture is that the too-big smiles were painted on after the film was developed.

"Nothing's wrong." She doesn't call her anything, not Mom and not Lorelai.

She doesn't believe her, runs through a list of questions. They sit in silence for five minutes and Lorelai lies that Sookie needs help.

She hangs up, only to find Jess staring at her from the bedroom doorway. He makes a comment about her lack of pants, but it doesn't register. When she asks him to repeat it, he sighs and walks out of the room.

There isn't any use in following him because the door slams soon thereafter and she's left sitting in nothing but his tee shirt, on their bed, with The Cure blaring throughout the apartment.

It upsets her and a thought flashes through her mind.

Maybe she's falling in love with him.

She brushes it off, because that would complicate it when he hurts her again.

They fight. Ever since they moved to the new apartment, they've been fighting. She has morning sickness, but she's determined to win the battle if not the war.

He says something about her mother, but she doesn't hear what and she's sure it isn't an insult because he probably likes Lorelai more than she does.

She doesn't respond, she can't, and suddenly he's frantic and just as quick, they're in a bright room with the smell of ammonia and Chanel No. 5.

"Emily was here," she manages to choke through the cottonmouth.

He nods, but he doesn't say anything. His eyes are bloodshot and puffy, but soon enough he's feeding her ice chips. "Luke came, too," he begins. The machines create noise, but what he seems to need is something more comforting.

She doesn't ask, because the answer would be no and she thinks that could upset her.

"That's good. You guys missed your last visit, its good you got to see him."

Jess stays quiet for awhile. Before he can bring himself to say it, though, she does. "I lost the baby."

He nods.

Biting her lip, she thinks on it. "I guess moving into a bigger apartment was a waste, then."

His face loses all emotion and he moves away from her. He hits the call button before sitting across the room and continuing his perusing of _A Farewell to Arms_.

She ignores him and the hospital staff and doesn't talk until four days later when she's discharged. She can't help but wonder how her mother is.

They're both quiet since the miscarriage, but when she asks to join him on his next Stars Hollow weekend, he's shocked. She stopped visiting her grandparent's ages ago, and he started spending Friday night up to Sunday afternoon in Stars Hollow.

"Why?"

But she doesn't know. She shrugs, mumbles something about her mother and coffee before disappearing into the bedroom.

He thinks she's second guessed herself and changed her mind until she returns as he's leaving, a suitcase in hand.

He offers to carry it and she lets him. He doesn't say anything about the strangeness of that.

The only thing Lorelai says to her is that she should have called. "I know."

She doesn't invite her in, or even move aside. She sniffles and, for the first time in months, wants to cry. So she does.

She chokes on air before she finds the words she wants. "I…This wasn't how it was supposed to go. Was it?"

Lorelai looks down, but doesn't say anything.

"I mean…not the visit. My life. It was supposed to be different from this."

Nothing.

She looks down, too. Mother and daughter concentrating on the same knot of wood. "Not my life before, but my one after. I was—" she chokes. "He was supposed to hurt me, he was supposed to make me hate him. And he didn't. So…I dunno. I started to love him again. I tried not to." She turns her gaze up, staring at her mother with pleading eyes. "I forgot that he doesn't want to live up to everyone's expectations."

Lorelai continues to stare at the knot of wood.

Without anything else to stare, she just turns around and walks back to the diner.

She's the talk of the town. Rory Gilmore, back. Far too thin and sickly pale and looking like death. She ignores the stares, the talk and the way people give her pity she so desperately wishes they'd direct elsewhere. She eats at Luke's while Jess serves. On his breaks, they're almost eighteen again. Hands and whispers and the only things to tell the town they didn't travel back to 2003 are Rory's deathly look and Jess' manly one. They sleep in the apartment, but that's all they do, and the townspeople arrive at the diner first thing on Saturday morning with the hope of catching a juicy bit of gossip.

On Sunday they do the same and she runs away from the stares and spends the entire day in the apartment.

At dinner time, she sees Lane for the first time holding a plate out to her. "I heard thin, and sickly, I didn't think you were suffering from a wasting disease."

She takes the plate and lets her friend in. They talk and eat and Lane's the only person she's talked to during her visit except for her mother and Luke.

Jess makes a call.

They stay in Stars Hollow an extra week.

It's Thursday before she leaves the apartment, but when she does she's taking a walk with Lane.

"Can we just go to your place?" she asks desperately, the stares getting to her.

"I…" Lane pauses. "My kids are there. I don't know if you…" She trails off.

Rory insists its okay. She'll be fine. She eats dinner with Lane, Zach and their three kids.

Halfway through the meal, she realises something. "I have to go. I have to talk to Jess." She shakes her head, trying to clear it, and Lane offers to drive her back to the diner.

"I want to be home," she calls as soon as she walks into the diner. A few of the patrons stare at her intently, and Jess too as she approaches him. They ascend to the apartment.

"I thought you wanted to stay in Stars Hollow awhile."

She looks down and wets her lips. "I do. That's…what I meant."

Jess stares at her as the people of the town do.

"This wasn't supposed to be my life, Jess. I wasn't supposed to be pushing thirty like this. I was supposed to be happy and have more than an English degree, a boyfriend and a dead baby. I was supposed to have something, to be something." She's crying. She's never been able to break up with someone.

"You do and you are!"

She shakes her head.

He forces her to look at him. "You have more here than in Philly?"

In return, she nods.

"What? Lorelai? Is that it?"

"What's in Philly for me, Jess? None of that is mine. It's all JessJessJess! I…I ha…I have nothing there. Here, I have history. I have family and more than one person to love me. And at least here, I know I love them back."

He doesn't say anything, just starts to pack his suitcase. "You don't have to do that," she whines, but he continues to pack.

"Jess…"

"You don't love me. I get it, so I'll get the fuck out of your life."

She whines his name again.

He tosses the suitcase aside and spins to look at her. "You are it for me. I've never wanted anyone as much as I want you and I've never loved anyone like I love you. Sorry if that doesn't work for you, but right now it gives me a good reason to be pissed."

She's silent, because she can't really say anything to it.

He finishes packing, starts out the door.

She stops him, hands him some things he left on the table.

He laughs bitterly. "You were wrong. I guess that's why you didn't want this."

"What?"

He holds up one of the things she handed him.

A pen.

**Reformatted and Edited:** 21 October 2008


End file.
